Edit: let’s see what happens if we add in enemies that do the same, some of which may mirror heroes.

Engineer class turret/sentry:

• Borderlands, Crimson Lance Engineer
• Brink
• City of Heroes, Malta Operations Engineer
• Guild Wars 2
• Hellgate: London
• Mass Effect 2
• Quake Team Fortress
• Star Trek Online
• Team Fortress Classic
• Team Fortress 2
• Warhammer Online
• World of Warcraft (trade skill)

Engineer class without turret/sentry:

• Anarchy Online (or are those robots turrets? haven’t played)
• Battlefield FPS series
• Bloodline Champions
• Eden Eternal
• Hellgate: Global (mobile robots)
• Mass Effect
• Torchlight 2

Non-Engineer class that builds a turret/sentry (“close-enough” names starred):

• **Asheron’s Call 2, Lugian Tactician
• Borderlands, Roland the Soldier, although he is canonically a former Crimson Lance Engineer
• **Champions Online, Inventor
• City of Heroes, Blasters and Corruptors with Devices (was Auto-Turret, now Gun Drone)
• DC Universe Online, Gadgets
• **Dungeon Fighter Online, Mechanic
• **Global Agenda, Robotics
• **League of Legends, Heimerdinger the Revered Inventor

Obvious turret analogue, but not “built”:

• Dark Age of Camelot, Hibernian Animist
• Guild Wars, Ritualist
• Warhammer Online, Chaos Magus
• World of Warcraft, Shaman

“Deploys” turrets s/he did not build:

• Diablo 2, Assassin
• StarCraft, Raven
• TitanQuest, Rogue
• Torchlight, Vanquisher (Arbiter tree)

Rejected, pending argument: engineer units from RTS/turn-based strategy games like Civilization.
Heard of but unknown to Zubon: Alpha Protocol, Return to Castle Wolfenstein.

Engi Census is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

After college, my group of friends spread across many time zones. At various times we had people in California, Texas, Arizona, Michigan, Japan, Australia, China, and the Philippines. We decided to schedule online gaming a few times a week, plus however often we could catch each other in-game. Our attempts at taking a pen-and-paper game online were not entirely enjoyable (software for that has come a ways, with voice chat these days if nothing else), and many of us were excited about Dark Age of Camelot, so we joined Albion.

In retrospect, there are only a few nights together that stand out in my memory. The first was very early, when we started crafting. The first tier of crafting has (had?) positive-sum quests around Camelot, so were all exploring the new and glorious capitol, skilling up madly, making a decent trickle of silver, and chatting as we ran around.

It was a great, simple night. Crafting has become known as a hardcore solo social gameplay style, and this was our first exposure to it. I think we used that night as fund-raising to found a guild officially, and we were all grouped so we could chat and share the occasional run speed buff. I cannot remember a thing we discussed, apart from how to find people and places around town, but it was a great session of digital hanging out.

It was also a great night for sights. If you have never played DAoC-Albion, that first moment of entering Camelot is magical. You will more recently have heard of that first time you crest the hill and enter Rivendell in The Lord of the Rings Online™, which is another magical moment backed by our shared experiences with the books and the movies. Now combine that with your first time in Thorin’s Hall, with its oversized architecture and majesty. Your DAoC starter town is the usual small town, humble beginnings, you know this. After the newbie levels, you are sent to the capitol. You follow the path, go by the farms, wind through the trees, and suddenly there it is: Camelot. I assume that Camelot is better known than Rivendell, and it is this huge castle with towering statues. To help the contrast, there is a mini-town just outside, a bunch of merchants in wooden stalls looking to sell by the gates. You pass them, you cross the drawbridge, and you really get a sense of scale as you enter the gates.

Entering pre-Shattering Stormwind was a lesser version. It has that same Western castle motif, complete with exiting the woods as you get there. But it is not Camelot, and the contrast with the newbie zone is not as severe (in scale and given its distance). DAoC also had a less cartoony and more low-magic style, which helps the contrast between the darker bits and the majestic ones. They both have that “lost in a huge fantasy city” feeling, and I imagine WoW gave most people their first virtual experience of that.

Very little of the mid-levels stand out in my mind. We must have spent time together fighting giants in the Salisbury Plains, but everyone in Albion spent a lot of time there on every character, and so it blends.

I more recall the late levels, before the last zones. We spent a fair while in Cornwall before the Lyonesse revamp. One night we just camped evil trees and talked. It seems like one of the first times we felt completely unguided, in a dead zone where you grind. There was a camp of trees not too far from town, we were all on, so we wandered over. I recall some of that being spoiled by having a non-guild Wizard ask to join our camp, which was my first experience with “look at my damage, I’m awesome!” folk, back before we started referring to people as “DPS.”

These were the levels when you were fully competent, both as a player and in terms of your character’s skills. It was one of those times when everyone could play the game without thinking about how to play the game. This frees up attention for better socializing and better play, which was good because the enemies were mean and increasingly social around then.

They changed the models on the local demon-things just as we were getting comfortable with the zone. Those things were mean, and they were spread so that someone running to catch up with the group usually brought a few; I recall monsters being willing to follow you for MUCH longer distances back in the day, including people who were killed back in town when enemies just kept following; I do not recall an “in-combat” indicator that let you know you were still being chased. There were some haunted ruins, great places to fight ghostly soldiers for an hour or two. I remember our first time visiting Lyonesse, with its haunted scenery and sudden jump in monster levels; the survivors met the folks coming from the bindstone.

The band started breaking up soon after that. We simultaneously hit the 3-4 month point at which most of our folks got bored of games, the leveling wall so steep that DAoC added half-level rewards to encourage players, the chance to spread out into different activities (PvE, RvR, alts), and changes in schedules. Some dropped, some drifted away, some began to play more with other groups of people. I obviously got into this whole MMO thing.

: Zubon

Becoming Hardcore: Dark Age of Camelot is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

You spend years making this base content. It takes a lot of work to recreate that leveling path several times, even if you recycle content across the paths (a roc is a red vulture, sure, why not). Unless you are Cryptic, this is something like a four-year development cycle. Now that the game is live, you are expected to patch in new content every one to three months while working on bugs and balance. At least you have some half-developed content that was meant for live, maybe even an advertised feature that was not completed on time; City of Heroes/Villains gets a special prize for patching in the last 10 levels after release twice. Oh, and you likely have an expansion every year or two, and that needs to be big enough to justify selling a new box.

Making new content for each faction is time-consuming, creates balance issues, and has limited value given the number of players at the level cap in multiple factions. Or you can make the new content once and send everyone through it. You will need faction-specific details, but the more overlap you have, the less content you need to develop. Add neutral factions that deal with everyone. Add common enemies. This conveniently encourages PvP and/or cross-faction teams, depending on how you set it up.

So you have one Outland and one Northrend. Albion, Midgard, and Hibernia fought over the one big dungeon, and now their descendants in WAR do the same. Superheroes and supervillains both fight the Hamidon, the Honoree, and Romulus (CoX is odd for having the Statesman Task Force and Lord Recluse Strike Force, very different parallel content). Holiday and event content is often mirrored, with the same content slightly redecorated for the factions’ cities or low-level areas.

I don’t know that I would prefer it any other way. It sometimes feels like corner-cutting, but I do not want to need level-capped characters across multiple factions to see all the new toys, and making two sets of them means more time or more cost. I would rather have two sets of content that I can experience on my main. Although it strikes me that Blizzard has the billions of dollars and the staffing and is still producing shared content at a Blizzard pace.

: Zubon

New Content Is Shared Content is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

The usual concept of a western MMO seems clearly descended from DikuMUD, through EQ and terminating in WoW. I would tend to insert DAoC in there, sometimes described as “EQ without the parts that suck,” but I may be atypical. Perhaps I am uncreative, but I do not see much more room for the Diku model to evolve. It has reached its full flower in WoW. You can have refinements and variations (-raids, +PvP, +story, -classes, +Tolkien, -fantasy, +F2P), to say nothing of lousy clones, but it will take something massive to change the view of the most typical member. There is a lot of room (and money) in WoW’s orbit, but if you do not want to be (seen as) conceptually subordinate, you need to head a good distance away.

We have some less typical members, most notably EVE Online. You all know how I love to pull out “here is how City of Heroes solved that problem,” or how I mix a dozen niche games into my bloviations. These can be annoying in the MMO blogosphere when commenters contribute them independently, not in the sense of “here is an alternate way of implementing that” but rather “your entire argument is invalid because it does not apply to my game (or playstyle).” It is as if you were complaining about birds pooing on your car, only to have a passerby disdainfully remark that there are not any penguins in the area and they could not have flown over your car anyway. Well, no, that is not what I meant by “birds,” but thank you for contributing.

The archetypal example may not be displaced by a better example. I describe Torchlight as out-Diabloing Diablo (for the single-player experience), rather than referring to Diablo as an early example of a Torchlight-style game. (I think of Diablo II as the most typical member there; is that what most of us mean by “Diablo”?) Amusingly, the “most typical member” need not have ever existed. You probably picture some central tendency of a robin rather than a particular bird you once saw. You may think of Dracula as your most typical vampire, but while he never sparkled, he could walk in sunlight; see also Igor and brain-eating zombies. Because Halloween is coming.

: Zubon

Most Typical Member is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Healing is great for marginal teams that are barely scraping by, but moving a team from “non-functional” to “winning” or from “winning” to “dominating” is a job for non-healer support. The best times I have had on any support character have been when healing is a secondary role. It is nice to have that in your pocket, in case things go pear-shaped, but support is at its best when healing is unnecessary. Debuffing is great, buffing is usually better, and control is invisibly wonderful if often fragile.

As with many things, City of Heroes does this the best of any game I have played. It is not readily apparent in the early levels, when defenses and abilities are weak and healing is necessary. It starts in the mid-levels and comes into its own in the late game. Everyone who got tired of things in the 30s? You missed the best part of the game (although I concede a love for the frantic newness of the low levels). Kinetics is the big star, with Fulcrum Shift as its last ability, putting your entire team at the damage cap. Life at the damage cap is a beautiful thing. Along the way, Defenders might put you at the speed cap; put all enemies at the speed, damage, or accuracy floor, or all at once; give everyone endless endurance (mana) and regeneration good enough to make healing redundant; and be the best pulling class around. Controllers do all of that with slightly lower numbers and the bonus ability of turning the enemies into statues. If you were not loving the game in the late levels, you were playing with/as a healer and not a Defender.

This is not CoH-specific. Playing a support mage in Asheron’s Call was a beautiful thing, letting my friends specialize all their attacks while multiplying their damage. There was a special joy in debuffing an enemy’s magic skills and watching it fizzle its attack spells repeatedly. My Theurgist in Dark Age of Camelot was a primary damage class that was more valued for its run buff, stuns and slows, and especially the bladeturn chant (self-refreshing group buff: the next enemy attack misses). A Minstrel will improve his legendary items’ healing cost and power buffs in The Lord of the Rings Online, but one “required” legacy is increasing the group melee damage buff, and the damage reduction from traiting for buffs is greater than the healing increase from traiting for heals. World of Warcraft is kind enough to make many buffs last ten to thirty minutes, for your ease as a buffer.

The life of a healer is usually boredom or panic. In a good group, there is not much to do. In a bad group, there are too many people demanding your attention at once, and in a badly designed encounter, you have people going suddenly from full health to nearly dead. Buffers are not half-AFK waiting for a green bar to go down, and there is always something interesting to do as a debuffer.

: Zubon

Support is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

I stand by my repeated claim that optimizing the new player experience is of paramount importance. You must grab my attention within five minutes, and you must deliver a satisfying hour or two for my first play session. Without that, any free trial is worthless, and you may even lose some people who have thrown down $50 for a box. This is the part of the game that every single player will see on every single character, and if you cannot do a good job here, I have no hope for the rest of the game. Yes, it is hard to make things interesting while giving the player only a few buttons to play with. Suck it up, we all have hard parts in our jobs. That’s why they pay us.

In retrospect, the original Asheron’s Call tutorial dungeon was truly horrible, only tolerable because these MMO things were just so new and exciting. The Lord of the Rings Online™ does a great job with its introductory instances, basic gameplay while introducing the setting and giving you some big name characters, and you don’t realize it is foreshadowing when an NPC saves the day while you watch. City of Heroes has a weak tutorial (including a “run in a straight line for 20+ seconds” segment), which City of Villains does better. World of Warcraft makes the less common choice of opening in its main game world, with no tutorial instance, but it manages to be dull for every race. Warhammer Online makes the same choice brilliantly by immediately tossing you into a warzone (best: Dwarf versus Greenskin newbie zones). The Champions Online tutorial just feels laboriously long. The Chronicles of Spellborn has a LotRO-style opening that ends well in a big fight with chthonic horror, but the gameplay along the way manages to be tedious even while very short. I remember starting A Tale in the Desert back before there was a tutorial, just drop you in the world and go; easily the most hardcore PvP game (with permadeath!) ever made. Wizard101′s tutorial explains things very well but is painfully slow and impossible to skip or hurry on a second character.

That hurdle overcome, the next question is where the most time is going to be spent in-game. Correct me if your game’s metrics suggest otherwise, but for most MMOs, it seems to be at the level cap. If nothing else, that is where your loud community is: the hardcore, the devoted, the guild community leaders who style themselves opinion-leaders or -makers (and may be). Any sane amount of content will occupy casual players, so giving people something to do at the “end” is how you keep and mollify the hardcore. How you do this well is widely disputed and the main topic of hundreds of blogs, so I will table (American sense) that issue.

World of Warcraft does this part famously well. Even if you do not like the WoW end-game, or the current end-game at any given moment, they have done a great job of recruiting and retaining players by putting an emphasis on late-game dungeons and raids. (Personally, I heard “the game begins at 80″ so many times that it was part of the reason I quit.) City of Heroes does this part famously sparsely, launching without the last ten levels and encouraging altoholism rather than building lots of level 50 content. Years into the title, there are exactly two raids and not a whole lot of level 50 task/strike forces (we try not to count the Shadow Shard content, out of politeness). Warhammer Online seemed to collapse (still does?) horribly at the level cap. Dark Age of Camelot had excellent realm-versus-realm combat but had horrible backlash when it added alternate advancement PvE content at the cap, creating a higher effective (and therefore required for PvP) cap. Back when I played, Asheron’s Call had a soft cap that amounted to an endless late-game. EVE Online has its PvP empire wars, to which Darkfall aspires. The Lord of the Rings Online™ has the ersatz version of the WoW end-game, taking the same approach but with very little content and alternate advancement grinds. It does, however, recycle its old end-games into new late-games better than WoW as the level cap rises.

Next up is the early game. If everyone is going to see that tutorial and new player experience, this is next, where you hope they all continue. It would be #2 on the list were it not for the amount of time your players can spend at the level cap between expansions. It remains very important, especially if it will consume most or all of the average player’s first month. A good start gave you a chance, but this is where you seal the deal and get the player to subscribe past the trial week or free month.

Age of Conan excels here, with near-universal acclaim for the Tortage experience. World of Warcraft varies between races/zones; playing on the Alliance side, I found I did not much like any early zones except for humans, although I recall a fondness for some early undead content. Dark Age of Camelot was good for its time but grindy and punitive in retrospect. City of Heroes/Villains does well except for a few painfully placed missions; maybe some of those are intentional, to make the travel powers that much sweeter. Warhammer Online is exquisite in tier 1, and if you have never played, you can go player tier 1 for free right now as much as you like. This is probably the worst time for EVE Online as players reach the “now what do I do” point. I have not tried the re-done LotRO low-level experience, but I always loved the Shire.

(Cynically, we also note that this is as far as most get in beta. There will be few to judge you on anything past this at release. This makes it a high priority while downgrading the importance of anything that will therefore have a smaller effect on your box sales.)

At this point, importance tapers off until you reach that end-game. Unless there is some modal point where most players end their second and third months, you focus on building the game out linearly. That early hook gives you some momentum through the mid-game. As long as the late-game is not so horrible that it is not worth getting through, players will get through those last few levels to see the glorious level-capped wonders they have heard to much about.

(Cynically, we note that promises to work on this area will carry you a long way. Wherever the population is centered at the end of the first month, just before subscription renewal time, announce you are going to fix that point and the range just beyond it. Repeat at month two. Warhammer Online did this brilliantly with developer letters just before renewal time in the early months. It helps if you can predict this point and really have improvements coming down the line, but developers are notoriously poor at predicting how quickly players consume content.)

You can see a great many games that have already embraced this approach. Part of it is just a natural consequence of sequential development. You worked really hard on the newbie zones in early beta, you worked on the glorious end-game wonders so you could show them off for the press, and then you fill in the middle as you get a chance, ideally trying to keep just ahead of the bulk of testers and/or players.

Some games really do fall down in the mid/late-game, hard enough to start seriously losing players. I love the 30s and 40s in City of Heroes/Villains, when all your powers and slots are finally coming together, but many people find it grindy without the quick progression from the early levels. Warhammer Online was appalling in the mid-tiers at launch, with poor PvE (“and such small portions!”) while the PvP balance problems were becoming apparent as all the powers and talents finally came together.

I’m stopping that thought so we can reflect. The mid to late levels are where you character finishes getting all of its abilities, with that “complete” point varying wildly across games and classes. If your game has horrible balance problems, they may be hidden under new shininess and quick growth, but they will become apparent in the mature levels. This is where the steam runs out for we the gameplay-Explorers. It is also where Achievers can jump ship as advancement slows down. This must disappoint the Killers: the sheep leave just as the wolves get the really fun ways to kill them all.

Zubon, it is sounding a lot like you’re saying that every part is important. And yes, I would love to say that, but experience suggests a few reasons why these later (but not end-game) levels are less important for retaining subscribers.

First, I am suggesting an extreme case of the game imploding. I do not know how many people ever experienced the Age of Conan end-game because the MMO blogosphere sounded like wailing from the fiery pits of Hell as people left Tortage. It is clearly possible to do far too little in that range, but many games get to “decent” at least.

Second, many of the extreme collapses are also end-game failures. They are balance problems or flaws in the fundamental systems that are to sustain players through the rest of the game, and there is no good news to reach after suffering through a near-empty, just-after-release late-game. These problems are not apparent in the early levels or not important enough to care about, while they first become visible in the mid or late levels. The Warhammer Online problems with city sieges compounded issues with the late-game open world RvR (plus a bit more), while the game had the same balance structure as most editions of D&D: just fine early on, when the numbers are small and luck can trump design oddities, but exploding into catastrophe as you multiply those oddities over many levels.

Third, “good enough” works. I would love to say that MMO players have discriminating tastes and high standards, but that is obviously false. We will put up with a lot of crap and flame anyone who suggests that quality and professionalism are below acceptable standards. One thing that Star Wars: The Old Republic has going for it is that at least some of their developers understand that the mass market will not put up with the crap we will, so selling to all those non-MMO addicts will involve improved accessibility and functionality (whether that idea has survived the EA merger is beyond me).

Kvetching aside, think of MMO players in two categories. For newbies, it is all new and exciting. Think back to your cherished memories of early struggles in your first MMO, and realize that you would never put up with EQ-at-launch today. Many of the problems in MMOs are not so bad once, just that we keep hitting the same bugs/grinds/AARGH for years. You will deal with it to see the new shiny when everything is new and shiny. New players are also more likely to play at a sane pace, perhaps try to experience everything on a first character (they don’t realize it is “first” not “my” character yet) before moving on to the next zone, thus giving more development time for that mid-game.

For veterans, we are obviously insane enough to put up with it, and we are already thinking long-run. Hardcore players are going to blast through come Hell or high water, and if the late-game content is weak, that is just more reason to push through to the promised land of Level Cap. You know common workarounds from previous games, you are tapped into the community to get tips on what is bugged and how to circumvent it, and you are already inured from years of suffering in previous MMOs. You have a community to help see you through, a guild of people to talk to, and you are not going to abandon your guild because (a) you like them or (b) you tell yourself you are playing to spend time with these people rather than get the next Ding! pellet.

So for all those reasons, I believe that if you sink the hooks in deeply, your players will probably view their first 40 or 80 hours as an investment rather than a sunk cost, and they will keep pushing on unless the game is truly painful with little promise of improvement. Or they are the much maligned, possibly mythical “tourists” who were never going to stay anyway, so again it does not matter.

Get the first day right: bait. Get the end-game right: long-term storage in the fish tank. Get the early game right: sink the hook. They may wriggle, but you will keep quite a few on the line with even a decent mid- to late-game. Or without the horrible fish metaphor: your early word of mouth gives the game life, and the long-run word of mouth sustains it.

: Zubon

Early, Middle, Late is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

: Zubon

Dreams Undreamt is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Look, if I fight wolves in the dwarf starter area, and I kill the requisite hundred and fifty thousand million of them for the Wolf-Slaughterer title, it’s fair to say that I’m pretty good at killing wolves, some might say that I am accomplished if not a little genocidal. Therefore, if I then go to another area, further afield than where one might find a new character normally, I should not find super wolves, ten times the power of a normal wolf, who have but to look at me in a slightly disapproving manner for all my armour to jettison from my body and my skeleton to explode out of my skin and bury itself five feet under the ground. I am a wolf slayer! Look! You gave me a bloody title to acknowledge the fact that I spent a lot of time killing wolves, why can I not kill these wolves? ‘Oh’, say the developers, ‘but these are different wolves’. Different how exactly? Were they privately educated? Have members of their number graduated from Sandhurst? Did they train at Hereford in the use of special tactics and weapons?

I comment with this image. That’s basically the state of things. The only thing keeping you from leveling on boars from 1 to the cap is that you must complete some quests to get access to zones, like exiting the newbie instance or the faction grind to get into Lothlorien, where the level 61 pigs are. You did not think of “access to higher-level pigs” as one of the benefits of that elf faction, eh? You haven’t even seen the edges of the box you’re trying to think outside of.

I pull this example from The Lord of the Rings Online™, but it is almost universal. My Dark Age of Camelot (Albion) character could do just the same, from piglets to rooters with some zombie pigs in between. I have killed the same goblin 100,000 times, with him in a variety of hats and colors.

: Zubon

The Problem, In a Nutshell is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

I have a very long version with many examples after the break, but that is the core of my message today: encourage grouping, do not require it, and make sure the game mechanics really do encourage it.

You encourage grouping by increasing rewards for groups and adding abilities that require groups to take full advantage of them. You require grouping by giving enemies ridiculous numbers of hit points, failing to scale encounters for different numbers, or making encounters that demand (or all but demand) several specific abilities that are spread across the classes. You discourage grouping by making quests difficult to do together and failing to scale encounters for different numbers. Yes, a lack of scaling can both require and discourage grouping.

Let’s take that one first. If the encounter is what it is, with no options to vary it based on who is attempting it, its requirements are static.

• If it is designed as solo content, you gain little to nothing for bringing a friend. Indeed, it might take the two of you longer to do it together than it would to do it separately, say if you each need to loot a dozen ground objects that despawn after they are looted; you would have been better off each going alone, five minutes after each other, rather than going together and waiting for the respawns. If the enemies are designed to be soloed, they will be radically unsatisfying fights for a full group. DPS is all that matters in those cases, with the rest of the classes trying to get a spell off before the target dies.
• If it is designed as group content, you cannot complete it without the right group size. If it is not designed for a full group, you can go a bit bigger, but see the previous point. If it is designed for a full group, you might be able to get away with being one member short, but you will inevitably need your holy trinity and/or crowd control. When the enemy has 20,000 hit points and regenerates 1,000 per second, you have no option but to bring >1,000 DPS; when it hits for 200-500/attack, area effect, with an attack every two seconds and a chance for critical hits, and your characters have 2,000-3,000 hit points, you must have a healer; and so on for whatever else is required for encounters.

(As I am tossing out numbers, my apologies if they are the wrong order of magnitude for your game. I always have that problem talking to my WoW-playing friends about The Lord of the Rings Online™: Shadows of Angmar™ prices. 10 gold is the most expensive item in all of Middle Earth, not a normal quest reward. So when a hobbit talks about something with 300,000 hit points, he means a full raid taking an hour against the meanest thing in the game, not a mini-boss.)

Without scaling, you either get a group then see what you can do, or decide what to do then put together the right group for that. Either you have who you want but your options are limited or you can do what you want but the “who” is limited. You need a happy coincidence to match your group with your plan.

I like the City of Heroes scaling because it opens the same content to many people. If scaled properly (significant if), it makes the mission equally difficult for one person as for a full group. Every group can do every mission. You can worry that helping someone does not help; if they could not solo it and the mission scales perfectly, you probably cannot duo it either. But I would argue that is a problem with that one mission, rather than the scaling that works so well elsewhere.

The real problem with scaling is that it limits developers’ ability to create interesting encounters. If everything must scale from one to eight people, there are a lot of things you cannot do unless you can re-write the same mission several times. You would be creating several pieces of content using the same art and text, then hiding all but the one for that group size. This would be inefficient and defeat the notion of “opens the same content to many people.”

One solution is to have tiers of the same dungeon (5-man, 10-man, 20-man, 40-man), so it scales but not as finely. Maybe there can be a little of that standard scaling in-between, so you dial the 5-man up for 6 or knock off some enemy hit points for 9. This last twist might lead to people min-maxing the best size for every dungeon, so it might be a really horrible idea.

Another solution is just to ignore it. City of Heroes have a few missions designed for a certain minimum, meaning they do not scale below that, but they otherwise scale up uniformly. Everyone, including fans like me, should recognize that City of Heroes has very little variation in its core gameplay. Smashing ten Freakshow is not that different from smashing ten Skulls, and there is no interesting synergy that makes ten Freakshow a different experience from six. The difference in experience is based on what the players bring to the table, because the enemies are bringing similar challenges to the table at any group size.

This points out a way to encourage grouping: what the player characters bring to the table. You want them to have abilities that work solo but do better in groups. City of Heroes has many area effect heals. That is fine if you are solo, especially if it is a PBAE, but isn’t it better if that same heal also helps four other people who are attacking while you hit it? Ditto on area effect buffs, debuffs that benefit all attackers, and area effect attacks. Why throw your fireball at three targets when you could hit ten for no extra endurance cost? That area effect hold is an expensive toy if you use it solo, but locks down twelve enemies as easily as two.

The best powers along these lines are auras. Auras have two great features: they work equally well on multiple targets, and they are low maintenance. I have already addressed the target issue, so let’s talk about maintenance.

Abilities with low duration are huge annoyances. If my buff lasts 30 seconds, I need to refresh very often. I may not bother to, making it a half-wasted ability. How much of your character’s life do you want to spend refreshing that one buff? Duration is often used as a way of limiting the available buffs, but there is a better way: just limit them directly. The Dark Age of Camelot concentration system does this (or did when I played). If you want one buffer to be worth “50 points” of buffs, give him 50 points to spread and leave them on until he dies or breaks group. If you really do want the buffer just to stand there buffing for his entire in-game life, make it a channeled ability rather than one with a low duration. Think of the medic in Team Fortress: he follows one target around and keeps pumping the juice. There is nothing wrong with a channeled buff, as long as the buff is big enough to be worth it: it admits to the player that this really is all he is doing, rather than getting him to think that he may not be chained to that animation for the rest of his life. (I prefer the concentration approach.)

No, we must go back to targets. Making buffs area-effect increases their value for reasons already stated. Think of how that interacts with single- versus multiple-target abilities. A teamwide buff that lasts ten seconds is something I cast every ten seconds; a single-target buff that lasts ten seconds will be gone from my first teammate by the time I put it on the last. My beloved Kinetics includes two buffs called Speed Boost and Increase Density. Increase Density cures and protects against some crowd control, which is a great thing, except that it lasts 60 seconds, single-target, in a game with teams of eight. No one wants to cast that every 8 seconds no the chance of a sleep or hold, so it is used reactively if someone gets held, with the protection as a secondary effect of the cure. Speed Boost is one of the best buffs in the game, but it only lasts two minutes, so you recast it frequently (or in fairly long binges as you hit the whole team).

On another front, single-target buffs with long cooldown/recharge times mean that you can keep it active on one teammate or maybe a few. This limits how much you are encouraging grouping, because it works as well in a duo as in a full team. Why meet new people if you need just one friend to get the most from your abilities?

(Does it show that I play support characters a lot? Yes, I think about teams in terms of sharing buffs and debuffs, not in terms of tanks and healers. Also, the benefits of area effect attacks in teams seem to obvious to belabor further.)

So auras get the best of both worlds. They affect everyone, no matter what the team size, and they are always on. You get a 5% damage buff if you solo; if you are on a team, everyone gets a 5% damage buff. Isn’t that team looking a bit better, especially since that other guy has a 5% accuracy buff? This encourages teaming by making what you already do better in groups, even without your doing anything else.

Note: if you balance around this too much, it can lead to forced grouping. If encounters assume multiple stacked auras, you better have multiple stacked auras, or you all die. See non-scaling encounters above, particularly the ones with “you must have this much DPS to ride.”

You also encourage grouping by giving rewards for it. By this I do not mean the standard forced grouping for late-game content, requiring raids to get the best equipment. I mean simply increasing the amount of experience and loot an enemy provides based on the number of people fighting it. Any game not doing that by now is too stupid to discuss, at least on the experience and currency side. Actual loot scaling is a hard spot for many. Sure, make that rat start dropping five or six tails.

This becomes particularly important for quest drops. One way of encouraging grouping is sharing “kill ten rats” quests. Heck, we could solo five rats next to each other while “teamed” and come out ahead. One way of discouraging grouping is sharing “get ten rat tails” quests but not increasing the number of tails per rat in groups. (Okay, that thought makes more sense for “get ten chunks of rat meat.”) If I must still kill ten rats per person to get my tails, why have I gained by grouping? This makes even less sense when the tail has less than a 100% chance of dropping. Each rat drops a tail 50% of the time, we have six team members, and everyone needs ten tails; welcome to the quest of “kill 120 rats.” Shoot me now.

The oddest example I have ever seen comes from the Evendim wood trolls in The Lord of the Rings Online™: Shadows of Angmar™. There is a quest chain involving them, and it is pure group content because it involves elite trolls that can sometimes aggro two or three at a time. The second quest is to get pieces of wood, and there are two sources. Some spawn on the ground around the trolls, so you can grab them as you clear trolls, and some trolls will drop some. There are several “some”s in that sentence, which is because the mechanic is not “everyone on the team gets one.” If you pick one up from the ground, you get one; if you loot one from a troll you get one, although some trolls seem to drop more than one, but only one per person and not enough for a full group. It seems that the amount of wood the quest-giver needs is multiplied by your number of teammates, but the amount of wood available does not scale, nor is the amount of wood designed for teams to collect even though you need a team to collect it. May the gods help you if another team is doing the same quest and competing for ground and troll spawns. (It does not help that the chain ends in possibly the most unreasonably difficult and under-explained quest in the game, even after a round of toning it down.)

This is part of my reason for looking forward to Warhammer’s public quests.

The Lord of the Rings Online™: Shadows of Angmar™ does have one of the best incentives to group in its fellowship skills. Randomly against elites, or whenever the Burglar uses a special ability, you get a chance for free health, mana, or damage, with bigger bonuses if you can coordinate your team, and even bigger bonuses if you have a full team. A full team can cure all its debuffs, summon two oathbreakers ghosts from Return of the King, or fire off an AE that is about half an elite worth of damage. And some classes let you buff the fellowship maneuver. Doing these well and often is the difference between a great group and a mediocre one.

I should explicity mention area effect attacks, just for completeness: they work better when you have multiple targets. Duh. If you fight one enemy solo and five in a group, your AE attacks are worth more in a group. AE crowd control is also worth more in a group. Please be careful if you have both AE damage and AE crowd control.

Sharing quests is the modern way to encourage cooperative questing (although public quests as auto-shared may replace that). WoW does this pretty well, as best I recall. The Lord of the Rings Online™: Shadows of Angmar™ is okay but not great. Many missions are in chains, and I cannot share step 5 with you if you are on step 3. Repeatable quests also have sharing issues, but that’s tech/buggy. City of Heroes is the best: for any instanced quest (almost all of them), everyone who walks in the door is sharing the quset. You get the mission complete bonus as long as you were there for enough of the mission. It does not matter who owns the mission; you still get the experience and influence. (You do not get your own private credit with the mission contact unless it was a newspaper/radio mission.)

City of Heroes is also the best known for having sidekicks, although EverQuest 2 and others now share this. You can encourage grouping by making level less relevant to group formation. I can sidekick up or exemplar down to be the same level as my friends. This works best if you have the “buy your skill once” system like City of Heroes, The Lord of the Rings Online™: Shadows of Angmar™, Warhammer, or any game that does not still require the stupidity of “Fire Bolt III.” Yes, WoW, you should just have Fire Bolt and make it scale with level.

Finally, you discourage grouping by placing hurdles between people and their quests. long delivery quests between group content bits in a quest chain are a great example. I do not want to make my group wait for me, nor do I want to wait on the slowest or least considerate person in my group. If step 4 is a cave full of trolls, steps 5 and 6 involve running across the zone three times, and step 7 is another cave full of trolls, I am probably going to do steps 4 and 7 in different groups. How do you prefer to wait: on people running or on groups re-forming, to say nothing of what you do when someone goes linkdead “but I think he’ll be back” on step 6.

The more extreme case is just to force solo content in there. The Lord of the Rings Online™: Shadows of Angmar™ has some of those: quests that you cannot do on a team. You must go into a solo instance. Hopefully your team needed a break at that point.

This is already tl;dr, and my apologies if the order was annoying. I decided to try a conversational flow rather than a closely structured list. Feel free to critique the style or content in the comments, or add your own examples of works well and poorly.

: Zubon

Grouping as the Better Option is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Yes, it encourages dual-boxing. Yes, there are times when you do want things to be timer-based. But if Bob can keep this buff on five characters continuously, just let him do it, rather than having him re-buff every four minutes.

: Zubon

Steal This Old Idea is a post from: Kill Ten Rats